Siblings of a Sort

From the moment Susan gave birth, she felt an intense need to meet Glenda. "I had to thank her in person for giving me my family," she says. So as soon as she and Bruce were up to braving airplane travel with twins  which Susan is slightly embarrassed to admit was not until their twins were 13 months  they packed up Jack and Chase and went to Wisconsin.

Even Scott was eager for the visit. Seeing the dozens of photos Susan e-mailed Glenda  of Susan with her twins on their first birthday, of Bruce showing them their first snow, of both parents' thrill at their first steps  had made the Lindeman kids, well, seem like Lindemans, not Lyonses. For Scott, the family had come to feel like people who should be in their lives  like long-lost relatives.

Before Bruce had parked at the end of the Lyonses' country road, Susan leaped out of their rental car. She pulled Glenda into a fierce hug and sobbed, "Thank you. Thank you." Then, Susan pulled her children out of their car seats and pressed them into their biological parents' arms.

"They really, really looked like our kids," Glenda recalls, describing her first encounter with Jack and Chase. "They had very similar smiles. But they didn't feel at all like our kids because we didn't know them and they didn't know us. They had other people's mannerisms. They looked at us like, 'Who are you?' "

But later, Glenda and Scott confided to each other that the Lindeman kids really did feel like family. And it was a pleasant, not painful, feeling. "Like nieces and nephews," Glenda says. Perhaps anticipating this, the Lyonses had told their sons and daughter, before the visit, that the Lindeman children were their new cousins  in kidspeak, family that doesn't live with you.

Susan and Bruce both thought that Glenda's explanation made emotional and age-appropriate sense, and went with it, too. Throughout the weekend, Susan watched the affection flow fast and free  "Glenda's mom just scooped Chase right up," she recalls  yet she remained confident of her twins' attachment to her. She was equally confident of Glenda's absence of maternal feelings toward them. So, Susan says, she was free to "discover connections" among the kids beyond honorary cousinhood. Her first: that her daughter, Chase, and Glenda's daughter, Sami, both have Glenda's mother's smile. Her second: that Glenda and Scott's parents consider all of the embryo children their grandchildren. Susan was thrilled.

"My dad died recently, and my mom is elderly," Susan says. "I like that the kids have all of this love."

"It really is like family," her husband, Bruce, adds. Then he smiles slyly. "Just without the baggage."

Dana wished to believe that introducing her twins to their genetic siblings would be so simple. "I wanted to meet the Lyonses." She felt her daughters had a right to hug the nice lady who, as she had told them since they were capable of understanding, "was so generous she gave me some of her baby parts" because her own baby parts hadn't worked. At the same time, she was terrified that fostering a connection would come with an emotional load she could not carry. "I had a lot of anxiety," Dana says. "Fear that Glenda was going to be a better mother than me, fear that my children would be drawn to her."

"I wasn't worried at all," says Cliff. "It was obvious from the day the girls were born they were completely attached to us. The only thing I've ever worried about [during this process] was Dana's health."

In March 2007, when Annie and Coco were 3, the MacMillans invited the Lyonses to visit more "cousins" in California. They decided to meet at the Lyonses' hotel. Dana insisted on driving her family. "We were running very late, and I missed the turn into the driveway. [I thought] here is this amazing woman, and I can't even get into the right lane in time to make a turn. [At that moment,] I was nervous that she wouldn't think we were good enough to deserve her babies."

The Lyonses were waiting at the curb, holding presents. The MacMillans had brought giant Easter baskets for the three Lyons kids. So the meeting began with an exchange of thank-yous, and you're-welcomes, and then-9-year-old Matt Lyons cooing at the two MacMillan babies, "My sisters! My sisters! My sisters!"

Glenda had warned Dana that her kids had recently seen a video of a TV interview Glenda had given about embryo donation. In it, the newscaster referred to all of the children born from the Lyons embryos as "siblings." Glenda had told Matt that just as she sometimes donates blood, she also "donated some cells that [the other parents] needed and didn't have. That's why [the other kids] look so much like you. Because you all come from the same cells."

Matt had said, "So we're brothers and sisters?"

And Glenda had answered, "Genetically yes. But they have their own family."

Dana found Matt's petting and cooing "a little surreal" but also "so sweet and tender." More important was the thing Dana could see  and intensely feel  between her daughters and Glenda: They were strangers. Glenda was gentle and sweet in greeting them, but the girls were at an age when familiar is always better, and they wanted their mom: Dana.

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